Chapter 10 #2
“I would have wed you,” he continued, “and watched as you grew plump as a hen on pastries and bread. Gods be damned, I would have cherished every inch of you.” He unlaced one hand to curl around my waist, tugging me closer.
“I would have lain with you each night in a warm cot that smelled only of us. You’d chastise me, of course, for the laundering.
The sheets would be drenched, night after night, sodden through from where I made you come apart again”—his hand slipped lower, grazing my rear—“and again”—fingers found the tuck of my skirts, pressing into a place that sent a rolling jolt of pleasure straight through me—“and again.”
My breath became a shallow, useless thing, chest rising and falling as though I’d just ascended the Grand Templum’s mighty west steps.
“I would have beheld your belly as it swelled with our child. Massaged your feet by the hearth whenever you pleased.”
A single tear breached my defence, rolling down my cheek. Rather than stay frozen in stone, like the First’s, it fell onto Demetri’s hand, wetting his skin. He glanced down at the tiny puddle, its surface catching the sconcelight.
“I would have spent every day as if it were our last, each turn a gift.” Mouth moving against my temple, he spoke into my hair. “I would have even let your fucking mother live with us, if that’s what it took.” I tried to pull free, aiming to swat at his chest, but his grip was a vice.
“Though you’d have to put an end to that nasty little habit she had…whacking me with a broom every time I put one tiny toe out of line.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You set fire to her bed.”
“Perhaps two toes, then.”
One tear opened the gates to the rest—they were relentless, but so was my smile—the salt of them slipping between my lips and adding salt to the wine.
I closed my eyes, lost to the memory of her.
“Ashara.” My name was a command. I resisted, if only for a heartbeat.
“Ashara. Fucking look at me.” I opened them and they locked with his, the hickory brown smouldering in the dim.
“A tether exists between us,” he said with the same kind of certainty as the pious recite their dues. “It has drawn us back together, like a thread of fate itself.”
I was on my back in an instant.
Pinned between Demetri and the floor, his weight bore down on me.
One of his hands cradled the back of my neck, whilst his other arm banded my waist. His body was hard, surprisingly so, the softness of youth dispelled by a crusiax’s training and battle.
My breasts, aching and heavy, moulded to his chest as they’d done to the ashlar.
It hurt, but not enough. It should hurt, it should be punishing; it shouldn’t just feel good, not with what awaited us once the sun crested the easterly ridge.
The smooth fibres of my bodice burned like pits’ yarn, their friction rubbing my flesh raw. I clawed at his shirt, pulling it loose from his breeches. He groaned, wasting no time to thrust the hard bulk of him into the softness of me, still padded by cumbersome fabric. I gasped all the same.
Curls falling forward and curtaining my cheeks, he loomed over me.
He stayed like that, the stiff swell of him pressed between my thighs, looking down at me with dark, hungry eyes for what felt like an age.
The moment suspended, hanging between us with nothing but our ragged breaths to punctuate it.
“Demetri?” I breathed, syllables thick.
Those hungry eyes slammed shut. “Don’t. Don’t say my name like that whilst you’re pinned beneath me.
Don’t say it again until I ask, or else I won’t be able to go as slow as I need to for the next part.
Do you understand?” His chest rattled as I lay sprawled open, legs aching with the strain.
A wooden table with leather straps flashed in my mind’s eye, only to disintegrate to ash once his teeth nipped my lip.
“I said, do you understand?”
I nodded, quaking but for an entirely different reason. This time, I wouldn’t have to close my eyes.
I understood what came next.
We were to conjoin in that place between my legs, below the part he’d coaxed pleasure from in the smithy, the part I’d explored on lonely nights in my cot, when the work from the guild was done.
But this was incomparable…nothing had ever matched the throb of need pulsing from us as he bunched my skirts to gather at my waist. No memory could hold a flame to the fresh feel of his fingers blazing a trail up my calf.
Yes, he’d touched me, many times, but never with this intention.
Never with the certainty he’d breach me.
My thighs tensed as Demetri’s hand stilled.
“We do not have to do this.” He nuzzled his nose against mine, the tip of it cold.
“I promise you.” His touch became devastatingly soft, too soft, skimming down my leg rather than up it.
A wave of panic bled from the dip of my neck to the pit of my stomach at the thought of it leaving me entirely. “Tonight has been enough.”
Skin pebbling, thighs exposed, I listened to the call of my body…my very-much-still-alive body: the blood pumping through every capillary, my thundering heart, the dampness seeping from between my legs.
“I want this. I want you,” I affirmed, nails digging into his arms through his sleeves.
“All the same, if you need to stop, I will stop.” He leaned back, the air vacuous between us.
I grasped at his shirt, worried he would disappear like ash on the wind if I didn’t hold on tight. “No, I want to do this…with you,” I repeated, craving the press of his body, the pain of the friction.
He lowered, one arm bearing some of his weight whilst the other stroked idle circles around the tops of my legs, streaking through the evidence of my want, so perilously close to that place I wanted him to explore.
“Do not stop, Demetri. By the gods, do not stop.”
Going rigid, a devilish grin spread like treacle across his face, revealing those straight, white teeth. “Did I not tell you to not say my name until I asked?”
His hand hovered above the damp of my arousal, the tips of his fingers skimming its bud.
“It was for good reason, too,” he continued, swiping down the length of my sex with barely-there fingers. I reared, chasing their touch. “Because now, you’ve only yourself to blame for what I’m powerless to stop.”
With that, he cupped me with unexpected firmness. I gaped at the sensation as his palm flattened to the most sensitive part of me, pleasure fanning outward, forcing a buck from my hips.
“Fuck,” he hissed, watching himself toy with me.
Rotating his hand in torturous, slow circles, Demetri rubbed me just as he used to, as if we’d done this every day, every turn, for cycles upon cycles, the pace and pressure exactly how I preferred it.
But then, two fingers dipped into my centre, not far enough to unseam me, but enough to cause me to gasp.
They edged deeper, delving as far as the acolyte’s.
I gathered the memory like dirty linens and hurled it onto an imaginary pyre, watching it burn to dust. The Dendralis had claimed eight cycles; they would not have our final turns, too.
“More,” I instructed, gripping his wrist and urging him in, his fingers still cautious and gentle.
He obeyed with a deep, claiming kiss, feeling me the way one never could or would again, tracing my walls with a come-hither curl and coaxing a moan from the depths of my chest. Yes, it hurt. Good. I wanted it to. It was an unnameable sensation, pain indistinguishable from pleasure.
“You are dripping over my hand,” Demetri breathed into the crook of my neck. His fingers edged deeper, the stretch and fullness balancing on a sword’s edge. With the intrusion came more of those delectable, delicious circles, the bite soon drowned by bliss.
“Remember to breathe. Just like I’m doing…that’s it,” he murmured, studying how the rise of my chest matched his own.
He moved faster, his upward strokes honed and precise, eliciting a tightening deep, deep in my stomach. Eyes shuttering, the feeling pulled tighter and tighter. I bit into his shoulder, trying to smother the obscene sound clawing to be free of my throat.
It escaped all the same.
“Hush, darling girl, or all of Thromarra will hear you—and those sounds are only for me.”
Demetri slowed his pace, his mouth finding mine.
“If you need to, give them to me,” he said against my lips. I lapped at him, invading every part of his mouth. “Pour them onto my tongue. I’ll lick you clean of every one.”
So I gave them to him, glutting him senseless whilst he worked at me until I was a panting, drenched mess.
He withdrew, the sound of it slick and wet, more debauched than any moan.
Knees quaking, hands trembling, I clung to his arms as I widened my legs, readying to meet him, readying to know him in every way.
His patience was over. With frantic hands, he unbuckled his belt, grasping hold of his arousal, heavy and thick, veined and beading.
I peered down my nose, desperate to witness the moment we’d join.
“This may hurt, Ashara,” he warned, lining himself up to my core. “I wish it would not, but it might. I promise the sting will give way to pleasure if you just breathe. I will go as slow as I’m able.”
Returning my gaze to his, I let him see the heady, cloying desire there. Wetting my lips, I rose on my elbows to press a single, chaste kiss to his mouth.
He parted me with the head of him, quickly finding the point where we would lose ourselves in each other. Pushing harder, I opened for him, his tip ghosting the source of my aching, insatiable want.
Just as he started to stretch me, the boom of slamming doors thundered through the chamber.
“To your knees!” a brittle, flustered voice barked. “His Holine—”
“Laurels, to your feet,” another voice commanded, harder than stone.
Demetri froze, chest heaving, his length fractionally buried inside me.
“Now!”
Teeth bared, Demetri withdrew, tucking in his shirt and buckling his belt with a contemptuous tenacity. Snapping my legs shut, heat scorched my face. I wrestled with my skirts, letting Demetri help me to my feet, finding most of the laurels already on theirs.
“Light the torches!” Paxiams rushed to collect the burnt sconces, rekindling them and casting light over the sea of flustered laurels.
Some were even more dishevelled than I, their clothes on backwards, hair wild. Mine must have resembled a thundercloud, tangled and rumpled from the floor. Others bore tear-streaked faces, their cheeks flushed purple and eyes bloodshot.
Struggling to right my neckline, my gaze drifted to a mesh barrier now angled towards me, framed by the doors. Atop it, stood three jutting points, their edges glinting in the fresh sconce light.
I had the sudden urge to vomit two chalices’ worth of wine all over the cushions.
The Butcher of Dendra.
“You stand accused, laurels,” he announced, helm fixed upon me. “A druid has been found dead in the templum.” There were teeth to every word. “Murdered.”
Chest rising in shuddering swells, both fists white-knuckled at my sides.
“Someone amongst you has done this, and that someone will be found.”